Does item quality affect wild surge quality?

In practice this means you stop triaging your inventory before you nurture. Offer the cheapest thing that the ecosystem will accept and keep the good stock. Any plan built around banking high tier items until you had enough for a strong surge is dead weight in the current build, and older advice telling you to save them is out of date.

What it also means is that nurturing has become a throughput activity rather than a quality one. Whatever decides how good a wild surge turns out, it is not sitting in your offering slot, so the only thing your items still buy you is the act of nurturing itself. Nurture more often rather than better.

The same trimming pass hit other stacking systems

Carried items no longer roll random rune slots, and the Legendary Runes that could be socketed into a Carried Item for large damage increases were removed completely before the 16 September 2026 launch. Legendary stardust yields and drop rewards have gone up. The pattern is consistent: fewer places where hoarding a rare input multiplies an outcome, more reliable returns from the base activity.

Aniimo is still actively in development, so systems in this area are still being adjusted. The developers are reviewing how players acquire Irisalis on the back of player feedback, which is the same kind of tuning.

Not settled: What does set a wild surge's quality is not spelled out anywhere, so there is no known way to influence it deliberately.